I thank you heartily for your kind letter of July 22 and the prospectus of your Vienna Conference. I hope the Conference may be followed by the best results. You are working, madam, with admirable devotion to your cause. I shall be very glad to see our anti-dueling movement once more approved by your assembly, as it was last year by the one at Glasgow.

With the highest regard, I remain

A manager made me an offer to arrange a tour through the United States for readings from my works. I declined; My Own’s uncertain state of health would have been a sufficient excuse for refusing the offer. I had no very clear conception of America, but I have a letter from Hodgson Pratt which he wrote after making a flying trip across “the great pond,” and in which he says, among other things:

... But my visit to the States convinced me that the great treaty would come! I returned quite infatuated with the Yankees,—improved Englishmen I call them,—so bright, so clear in thought and word, so resolute, so animated, so strong! It was almost a new revelation to hear and see those dear younger cousins. They have our British solidity, but with a youthfulness we have lost. I never spent six months of such enthusiasm.

When I first read this letter, dated in 1897, it did not mean much to me. But since I myself have been in America I understand Hodgson Pratt’s words, and I subscribe to every one of them. Yes, “clear and strong, resolute and animated,” they certainly are; yes, “a revelation,”—so appeared to me, too, that new young world!

In the summer of 1902 we received several interesting visits at Harmannsdorf; I mean visits from abroad, for with our friends of the neighborhood there was always continual going back and forth. The visitors to whom I refer came from St. Petersburg and the Caucasus.

First Emanuel Nobel, my departed friend Alfred Nobel’s nephew. I found that Emanuel had many traits of resemblance to Alfred,—the same seriousness, the same depth, the same broad, democratic ideas. In his outward semblance, also, and in his voice the nephew reminded me of the uncle. Emanuel is unmarried. The rumor that he was to marry his friend Minister Witte’s sister proved to be false; he lives in absolute devotion to his brother’s numerous family. He is at the head of the greatest naphtha business in the world. Fourteen vessels carry its products on the seas. Twice a year he journeys to Baku, where his most productive oil wells flow. When, a few years later, during the Russo-Japanese war, those oil wells were set on fire and blazed up into the skies like pillars of flame, his losses must have been immense.

The second visit from abroad was from the Princess Tamara of Georgia and her two daughters. They stayed two days at Harmannsdorf, and we indulged in endless reminiscences of the old times in the Caucasus. That beloved, beautiful country, too, was to endure the most atrocious sufferings from that miserable war.

During August of that year my husband and I accepted an invitation from Count Heinrich Taaffe (son of the former Austrian Prime Minister) and his charming wife to visit them at Castle Ellischau in northern Bohemia, where we spent a very delightful week.

A beautiful surprise was sprung upon me there. One evening about nine o’clock, as we sat after dinner on the balcony, from which there is a wide prospect of wooded mountains outlined on the horizon, suddenly on a summit against the dark sky the word “Pax” stood out in giant letters of flame. At the same time, from the distance, little lights, glimmering ever more numerous and ever nearer, approached the castle through the shrubbery. It was a torchlight procession. A throng of people came up, a band of music began to play, and finally the whole procession halted on the open place below the balcony. A man stepped forward—he was the school-teacher—and delivered an address in Bohemian, in which the word “peace” frequently occurred. I had to make a reply, also in Bohemian, my host whispering the words to me, for I do not know my native tongue. To be sure the Kinskys are a Czechish family, but in my childhood the Czechish national consciousness had not awakened, and as I grew older I was no longer receptive to it, having attained the European consciousness. But I was none the less pleased with the schoolmaster’s discourse. The village people—those also from neighboring villages—stayed about for a long time; the musicians played a polka and the young people danced. My husband and I were heartily delighted with the clever little festival. Never did a more grateful fireworks audience utter its “ah!” than we at the moment when the lofty “Pax” illumined the evening sky.

Fortunate will be our descendants for whom this word shall gleam on the political horizon, not as a fleeting pyrotechnical display but as an unalterable token.

In September the Interparliamentary Conference was to have been held in Vienna. Baron Pirquet was at the head of the organization committee. The preparations were under way, the programme had been sent out, the opening day was appointed, when, just on the eve of it, a circular was dispatched stating that on account of unforeseen technical difficulties the Conference would have to be given up and postponed until the following year. Baron Pirquet confidentially informed me that the difficulties were not technical but political. This was a hard blow to him.

I also was painfully affected by the circumstance, but at this time I had quite different troubles. While at Ellischau, even while at Lucerne, My Own had often complained of pain, and many of our friends later told me that they had been shocked at his appearance.

A long, long illness began. First—but no. I will not here relate the story of this tragic time—not here. In Briefe an einen Toten (“Letters to One Dead”) I have related to the beloved Shade everything,—how he and how I suffered, and how he died.

December 10, 1902, was the day of his death. Up to the ninth I confided to my diary all the phases of my anxiety and my hope, my despondency and my despair. It is astounding how much like a friend such a book becomes to one—how one can tell it all one’s thoughts and complaints, how one can shed over it the tears that one must hide from others, particularly from a dear one who is ill. But on the tenth of December I could write no more, and not for a long time afterward.

Much later I came back to this trusty confidant and made a large cross on the last written leaf. On the new page I wrote:

December 29. Here yawns a terrible hiatus in this book. The most awful days of my life, henceforth to be lonely, so inexpressibly lonely....

On the tenth, after an hour of agony, and after he had called me by name, My Own, My very Own, breathed away his precious life!

Maria Louise, Sister Luise, Pauline, the two physicians, and I stood about his deathbed—endlessly sad and tragic hours....

Have lost everything!

Then followed the days and nights of the deathwatch.

So lovely he lay there with his own characteristic smile on his cold, ice-cold lips, which I could not kiss often enough....

On the thirteenth solemn service for the dead; the weeping inmates of the house and the villagers; the mourning guests. We accompanied the coffin to Eggenburg.

On the fourteenth the journey to Gotha.

On the sixteenth the flaming pyre!

During his lifetime he whom I lost said to me many dear and beautiful words, which are imprinted on my heart; but the loveliest are those which he spoke from beyond the grave, in his last will. After a few last instructions and directions it reads:

And now, My Own, one single word to thee: Thanks! Thou hast made me happy; thou hast helped me to win from life its loveliest aspects, to get delight from it. Not a second of discontent has ever come between us, and for this I thank thy great understanding, thy great heart, thy great love!...

Thou knowest that we realized within our hearts the duty of contributing our mite to the betterment of the world, of laboring, of struggling for the right, for the imperishable light of the truth. Though I go home, for you this duty is not extinguished. Thy happy recollection of thy companion must be a support to thee. Thou must work on in our plans, for the sake of the good cause keep up the work until thou also at last shalt reach the end of the brief journey of life. Courage then! No hesitation! In what we are trying to do we are at one, and therefore must thou try still to accomplish much!

Conclusion

I am going to break off these records of my life at this point; I cannot call that which has filled my days between the tenth of December, 1902, and the present time, life. To be sure, I heeded the injunction which came to me from beyond the grave, and I have worked on; and I have seen in the loom of time much of that red woof to which my thoughts and desires are directed. I shall go on to speak further of that, but not in connection with the other personal things commemorated here. Moreover, the events of the last few years are still too near at hand to furnish a satisfactory perspective.

Since my career, however, does not end with that date of sorrow—since I have not yet reached, as the will says, “the end of the brief journey of life,” I shall have much more to communicate concerning the further course of that movement in which I have found my life task.

In the last six years important phases have developed in the battle between the cause of peace and the cause of war: for instance, the Anglo-French entente; the series of arbitration treaties following one after another (some among them without the usual limitations); the outbreak and fearful catastrophes of the Russo-Japanese war; the Hull incident, which, through the application of an investigation commission instituted by the Hague Court, was prevented from developing into a world conflagration; Roosevelt’s action in restoring peace in eastern Asia; the entrance of the North American group into the Interparliamentary Union; the rising cloud between England and Germany; its dissipation through the exchange of visits of international corporations brought about by the pacifists; the further assignments of the Nobel prizes; the activity and expenditures of Andrew Carnegie for peace purposes; the peaceful separation of Sweden and Norway, the first example of the kind in history; the lessons of the Russian revolution; the recent proposal of the English premier, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, for a union to limit armaments; the calling of the Second Hague Peace Conference; the Interparliamentary Conference at London, at which, for the first time, members of the Russian duma participated, though on account of the dissolution of the duma they were obliged to withdraw (La douma est morte, vive la douma!); the labors and congress of the Universal Alliance of Women for Peace and Arbitration under the chairmanship of Lady Aberdeen; the Second Hague Peace Congress, this time including representatives of forty-six countries, with the wedge still further driven in by doubters and opponents determined to change the character of this world parliament so that it shall come to be merely a court to regulate wars; the favorable results, nevertheless, of this Conference resulting from the spirit of the cause and promoted by our adherents who were present; the brilliant début of the South American countries which were represented in it; the determination to continue this international coöperation; the progress of the anti-dueling movement assisted by the King of Spain and the King of Italy; the resolutions passed by the socialist congresses in favor of fighting against war; the increasing number of ententes, in which the adherents of the old views, and with them the press of almost the entire world, suspect that they can see aggressive alliances formed against third parties, but which in reality are merely new meshes of the net making for the peaceful organization of the world; the conquest of the air, the most revolutionary event of recent centuries in the development of civilization, but in which the shortsighted see nothing else than a useful means of hurling explosives, although it really involves the abolition of boundaries, fortifications, and customhouses; at the same time the conditions in the miserable Balkan states, where for long years brigandage and manslaughter and atrocities have been raging and the war storm may break at any moment.

I have not held myself aloof from all these things; I have chronicled them in my diaries with notes, documents, and correspondence. During these last six years I have been about the world a good deal and met many interesting people. For four winters in succession I have spent several weeks as the guest of the Prince of Monaco in his crag-seated castle, and have there met prominent personages from princely, scientific, diplomatic, and artistic circles. A journey to America^[49] brought me into touch with Roosevelt, and opened before me vistas into that country of unbounded possibilities, or, rather, as it presented itself to me, of impossibilities overcome. I have participated in the meetings of congresses during that time, namely, the Peace Congresses at Boston, Lucerne, Milan, and Munich, and the Woman’s Congress at Berlin. I attended as a guest the Interparliamentary Conferences at Vienna and London. I have had frequent meetings with my old colleagues, and I have seen new laborers in the common cause come to the fore: for instance, Richard Bartholdt, founder of the American group; Sir Thomas Barclay, the zealous associate promoter of the Anglo-French entente; Lubin, the initiator of the Agricultural Institute at Rome; and Bryan, the candidate for President of the United States. I have been enabled to follow the great services rendered the peace movement in Germany by Pastor Umfrid, by Professor Quidde, and by many others—I cannot name them all. In the year 1905, accompanied by Miss Alice Williams, I made a lecture tour through twenty-eight German cities. In the spring of 1906 I had to go to Christiania to deliver there before King Haakon and the Storthing the lecture required of the recipients of the Nobel prizes. At that time I made a journey through Sweden and Denmark. Finally, in 1907, just as eight years earlier, I was present at The Hague during the time of the Peace Conference, and kept an exact record of all the transactions, personages, and social functions. All these experiences, impressions, letters, and memoranda may sometime come into use for supplementing the reminiscences (so far as they bear upon the historic development of the peace movement) which are here brought to a conclusion; and, should I not myself arrange for their publication, they will be found among my possessions after I am gone.

What the immediate future will produce in this domain will assuredly surpass in significance the modest and hidden beginnings. Though the contemporary world is quite unconscious of the fact, the movement has spread far beyond the circle of the Unions, of the resolutions, and of the personal activities of single individuals; it has grown into a struggle which involves the very conception of life and all natural laws. It has passed from the hands of the so-called “Apostles” into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awaking democracy; within it work a hundredfold various powers, unconscious that they are thus working. It is a process which is being accomplished by the forces of nature, a slowly growing new organization of the world. The next stage is to be something quite concrete, perfectly attainable, absolved from all theoretical and all ethical universality,—the formation of an alliance of European states.

Whatever the old system may accomplish by its endeavors, however insanely high the supplies of the opposing instruments of destruction may be heaped up, whatever horrors may break out in isolated places in the way of warlike reactions, I have no fear of being discredited in histories written in the future when I here register the prediction, Universal peace is on the way.

And even if to-day many look askance at these prophecies, and turn from the whole cause,—indifferent, yawning, shrugging their shoulders, as if it concerned something impractical, unessential, fanciful,—yet very speedily, if once that which is in preparation, as yet silent and unobserved, comes into sight, there will be awakened the general realization that this cause demands conscious coöperation, that it includes the mightiest task of onward-marching human society,—in a word, that it is “the one important thing.”

For the English-American edition of this book I will add a few reminiscences of my visit to the United States as I committed them to paper in October, 1904, while returning to Europe.

Here on board the Kaiser Wilhelm II I find time and leisure to set down in my diary some of the multitudinous and vivid impressions whereby the store of my experiences has been increased through my brief, all too brief, sojourn on the other side of the ocean.

The thirteenth World’s Peace Congress was opened in Boston on the fourth of September. That was the object of my journey; so I was not induced to cross the ocean by my desire to make acquaintance with the New World, and yet a wholly and completely new world was revealed to me.

I will begin at the embarkation. My traveling companion and I spent the evening before in the senators’ room of the Rathauskeller at Bremen, where the local group of the German Peace Society had arranged a small festivity in our honor.

I saw there the enormous hogshead which holds ever so many gallons, and the one that is filled with such precious old wine that every drop is reckoned as worth so many hundred marks, and the beaker from which Emperor William II is accustomed to drink when he visits the wine cellar, and—what pleased me most—the model of the fountain on which the quaint city musicians of Bremen are portrayed, namely, the ass on which stands the dog which supports the cat on which sits the cock,—possibly very clever, but certainly extremely lean, tone artists.

The next morning, which was bright and clear, we proceeded to Bremerhaven by a special train. This train takes transatlantic passengers only, and stops directly opposite the gangway of the steamship. When we arrived at the dock, gay music was pealing from the deck, and we went on board as if we were embarking for a pleasure sail.

After a brief hour’s delay our floating palace, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, gets under way. The receding rim of the harbor is filled with people still waving their farewells, and the travelers on the decks are also waving in response. At the same time the ship’s orchestra has begun to play again. It is a melancholy moment, although the soul is raised on high with expectation as we sail out over the broad ocean into another portion of the world, into the land of unlimited possibilities, and away from the old home, perhaps never to be seen again. What thoughts fill the emigrant’s soul? Experienced globe-trotters, who cross the great pond every year, may be as calm and cool at this moment as we are when we hear the signal for the starting of the train from Mödling Station to Vienna; but I, who was making my first trip across the Atlantic, experienced something of the solemnity of a parting mood, although I left nothing behind save an urn of ashes!

It was a beautiful, smooth passage, with only two or three hours of pitching and discomfort during the whole voyage, which was free from fog and storm. We had a very agreeable captain,—I had the privilege of sitting at his right hand at dinner,—and also very interesting traveling companions. Ah! and this beneficial state of emancipation from the woes and the worries of the day, and no newspaper with descriptions from the theater of war. Fortunately the Marconi system is not sufficiently advanced to give us daily tidings in full detail. That is destined to come about, but it is to be hoped that the news then will contain fewer barbarities. Ultimately the moral improvement of the world must keep step with the technical.

We went through a half hour of anxious excitement on the high seas. We were sitting comfortably on deck, reclining in our steamer chairs, engaged in reading or contemplation of the play of the waves, or lazily thinking of nothing at all, when suddenly a commotion began on board. There was a clamor of voices, and sailors ran hither and thither. The travelers rushed to one place on the quarter-deck.

“It is sinking!” cries one.

“What is sinking?” I inquire, with pardonable interest; “our ship?”

“No—do you see—yonder—”

Now I, too, hasten to the rail; I see at some distance a sailing vessel, a three-master, rocking on the waves. It is on fire; our ship hastens toward her under full steam. Possibly there may be something there to be rescued,—even human beings raising agonized prayers for aid.

That was not the case; the vessel was a derelict. But if there had been men on board, how we should have trembled, how anxiously we should have followed the work of rescue that our captain would have set on foot with all zeal, and how we should have clamored with jubilation had he succeeded. Even if there had been no more than one man on board the unfortunate craft, and he had been rescued from the extremity of despair, what joy! But when the next Marconi dispatch brings the news of a bath of blood at Port Arthur or Mukden,—that is merely an interesting piece of news! What an insane contradiction! In regard to this I will only say that such things must cease, for contradictions cannot prevail; they annihilate themselves; that is the law of nature. The time will come when the sacred sea, that binds all nations together, that distributes wealth among them, that has been made serviceable through the powers of man for the aims of happiness, will be no longer desecrated by explosive mines and submarine instruments of destruction.

On the seventh day we entered the harbor of New York; the Statue of Liberty held out her torch to greet us,—a torch so great that a man can take a walk around its handle. But grand and triumphant as the statue is, its ideal falls below it even in America, which in the national hymn arrogates to itself the proud title, “Land of the noble free.” If ever there was a dream projected into the future, it is the dream of freedom, up to the present time unfulfilled everywhere, yet ripening toward fulfillment. Perhaps America, the young land unoppressed by ancient traditional fetters, is the land where that torch will first flame forth and then illuminate all the corners of the earth.

I had, by the way, my first taste of its lack of freedom, at the dock, where the vandals of the tariff rummaged in the depths of my trunks and subjected my fur cloak to a searching examination. Heaven be praised, it was not sealskin! And while I was trembling with the excitement of the inspection, three reporters were asking me about the programme of the Peace Congress and about the prospects of the war in eastern Asia.

“Who will win, Russia or Japan?”

“Both will lose,” I replied, opening a trunk—(to the customs officer) “Only old clothes!”—(to the reporters) “Both will lose, and mankind with them.”

We proceeded directly to Boston, and, as night had already come on, the first impression of New York, which we crossed from Hoboken to the Forty-second Street Station, was only one mad whirl of dazzling lights, roaring streets, and houses high as the sky!

Boston has the reputation of being the most European city in the United States, and likewise the capital of intellect. Really I have not much to offer in the way of descriptions and observations; Boston for me was the gathering place of this year’s Peace Congress, and as such absorbed all my thoughts and attention. Here I was, then, once more in another quarter of the world, and just as at Rome and Budapest, as in Hamburg and Paris, among good old comrades; once more I was on the international forum, where the ideal of international friendship, with its promise of happiness, is practiced among the participants and is striven for in behalf of contemporary and succeeding generations.

The sessions of the American Peace Congress showed clearly enough what immense strides the peace movement has recently made, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the awful wholesale slaughter in eastern Asia, which arouses universal horror. The conviction that this matter is not only one of the weightiest questions of the time, but is the question of the future, and is the foundation on which a new era of civilization, already dawning, is to be erected, is penetrating into ever wider and wider circles, and is already forming in America a consistent part of public opinion, as was well shown by the course of the thirteenth Peace Congress and the interest taken in it by the people.

Of course there, as everywhere, one finds a chauvinistic tendency, a “yellow press,” imperialistic appetites, and the like; but in corroboration of the above-expressed opinion, that the peace question is the predominant one in the public mind, stands the fact that in the presidential campaign now convulsing the whole country the peace sentiment is incorporated into the platform of the Democratic party, and that Roosevelt’s opponents are striving to belittle, as an election maneuver, the peace policy which he is now so energetically advocating. The great mass of the people, and especially the more intelligent classes of the country, are strongly opposed to an unlimited increase of the navy, and to the spread of military institutions and of the warlike spirit.

A remarkable land, “Land of Unlimited Possibilities,” as it has been called in the well-known book title; verily it might rather be called “Land of Conquered Impossibilities.” Indeed, this young world,—in the true sense of the word, this New World,—exuberant in strength, glad in its daring, with peculiar insistency “gets on the nerves” of people of strong conservative feelings. But any one who looks to the future, any one who cherishes a comforting faith in development, will here feel joyously strengthened in his hopes of progress. Certainly all the acquisitions of the New World will redound to the advantage of the Old World, just as all the treasures of culture of the Old have been taken over and will still continue to be taken over by the New. It would be good if Europeans, eager to learn and to know, might be turned to America, in such mighty throngs as America pours into Europe. Yes, the nations have to learn from one another; that is better than for them to blow one another into the air. If one man desires to climb higher than another, he must mount on the other’s shoulders, but not throw him down.

The recent period, during which a World’s Fair and such numerous congresses—the Interparliamentary Conference and Scientific Congress at St. Louis, the Peace Congress in Boston, and the like—have attracted to America so many Europeans, will do a vast amount toward widening the knowledge and at the same time the appreciation of what we should get from and for America.

But let us return to the peace meetings. This time I was unfortunately unable to attend the Interparliamentary Conference. What a brilliant success it was we shall soon know by report. The members of the Conference were the guests of the government, and as such were specially honored, not only by the officials but also by the inhabitants of all the cities that they visited; and their two most important resolutions—the calling of a second Hague Conference and the establishment of a permanent International Congress for the discussion of world interests—have been laid before President Roosevelt and by him in a measure put in motion.

Who can doubt that the calling of a new Hague Conference, just as was the case with the first, will meet with much opposition, and that attempts will be made to belittle its significance and render nugatory its results? Nothing great and new is ever accomplished without opposition. But just as the first Conference, in spite of everything, left behind it not only the fact of the tribunal established and the text of the agreements “for the peaceful solution of international conflicts by means of the Court of Arbitration, mediation, and commissions for intervention,” but also the solemn declaration that the moral and material welfare of the nations requires a reduction of the burden of armaments, so also the next Conference will certainly bring forth further and fresh results. Granted we have the letter of the law already, all that is required is to breathe into it the spirit of life. “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” says the proverb; but where the way is all open the will must be exerted.

I obtained accurate details concerning the satisfactory proceedings of the Interparliamentary Conference, and the reception of their delegation at the White House, from the lips of several of its members, who, being also members of the Peace Unions, attended the Boston Congress, of which they brought us reports. Among them were William Randal Cremer (the last year’s laureate of the Nobel peace prize), Dr. Clark, Houzeau de Lehaye, and H. La Fontaine.

The opening of the Congress in Boston took the form of an imposing festival. Begun with religious exercises, supported by the lively interest of the public and the press, the event was regarded, throughout the country, as the event of the day; and all the more as the first statesman of the United States, John Hay, delivered the address of greeting. In this address, which, by the way, was telegraphed all over the world, there were none of those diplomatic “ifs” and “buts” and “to be sures” and “on the other hands” which are customary on such occasions; it was a frank, unreserved recognition of the justice and attainability of the aim of the Congress, and it contained the declaration that a new diplomacy and a new system of politics henceforth must accept the golden rule (“What ye will not have done unto you, etc.”) as a pattern of conduct,—a rule which has been banished from high politics hitherto by so-called practical politicians, on the ground that it was unpractical and idealistic. At this introductory meeting the great hall of Tremont Temple was filled to the last seat, and at least three thousand people tried in vain to obtain entrance.

About one hundred and twenty delegates came from Europe. That is not a large number; the majority and the most prominent among them came from England. Carnegie, whose attendance had been announced, was prevented from coming, and merely sent a significant letter. There were legions of addresses of approbation from various bodies, religious, scientific, industrial, and the like. One of the most noteworthy addresses, and absolutely unique considering the source from which it came, was subscribed, “Twenty-third Regiment, Massachusetts Infantry.”

Besides the regular transactions, which were followed by large, attentive, and receptive audiences, the Congress gave a great series of public meetings at which the peace question was elucidated from different points of view, as, for example, “the peace question and the school,” “the peace movement and socialism,” “the duties and responsibilities of woman in the peace movement,” and the like. The classes concerned thronged to all these meetings,—the women to one, educators to another, and laboring men to the third.

A meeting touching the question of disarmament, and offering as its chief speaker the well-known General Miles, was attended by many military men,—probably by some of that Twenty-third Regiment. If the Twenty-third Regiment has so much intelligence, there is no reason why the Twenty-fourth, and other regiments—and in other states as well as in Massachusetts—should not understand that, though they will do their duty while war exists, nevertheless the “warless time”—as the Prussian Lieutenant Colonel Moritz von Egidy saw it coming—is worth striving for.

The public interest aroused by these addresses was so great that, although several meetings were held simultaneously and in large auditoriums, every place was always filled to overflowing. The speakers were always assured of the greatest applause when they called attention to the fact that America’s glory and grandeur consisted in having attained such proportions without a standing army, safe without defense, giving the world an example of peace; likewise when voices were raised against imperialism, which seemed to be gaining ground in many places, or against the threatening increase of the navy and the danger that the poison of militarism might infect the whole land. Since the war with Spain this virus has certainly worked its way into the system; but, judging from what we saw, heard, and read in the papers (with the exception of the “yellow” journals), the American organism is protecting itself vigorously against it and will, it is to be hoped, cast it out altogether.

The scenes that took place at the socialist congress at Amsterdam were repeated on the Boston platform,—a Japanese and a Russian shook hands amid a storm of applause. According to old concepts were not both of them traitors to their native countries? Or is the whole thing somewhat comical? On the contrary, is not this action more attractive than that which was related on the same day in a report from the theater of war. In one grave two dead men were found clutching each other; the hand of the Japanese was clinched on the Russian’s throat and the Russian’s fingers had penetrated the eye sockets of the Japanese.

A Hindoo, in native costume, from the sacred land of the Lama, was also there. He complained of the desecration that the war had wrought in the monks’ places of devotion. “I come from the jungles,” so his speech began, “and to the jungles I return.”

A tiny Chinese woman, also in national costume, was one of the most popular speakers at the Congress. Her name is Dr. Kim. Educated by English missionaries, she had come to America to study medicine, and now she is going back to China to practice there. She speaks exquisite English, and with the sweetest voice and a smiling mouth she spoke the bitterest truths to the Europeans about the presumption with which they were trying to impose their warlike civilization upon an older and peaceful culture, and their dogmas upon a ripened philosophical view of the world, and, finally, were aiming to treat the Chinese Empire as a country to be looted.

“We can learn much from you, friends” (the word “friends” she spoke with a peculiarly sweet intonation), “that we grant; and if those lusts of conquest prevail, then we shall have to be grateful for learning from you, friends” (spoken tenderly), “the art of defending ourselves successfully against you.”

I have had opportunity for but little sight-seeing about Boston, for the days were filled with meetings and labors. But the Public Library I did visit. Oh, those book palaces, those book cathedrals in America! What is not granted there to the people hungry for learning! And in what form it is given! The building is adorned with all the magic of architectural and plastic arts; the frescoes that adorn the palatial stairway—designed by Puvis de Chavannes—are a poem; another great master, Sargent, was intrusted with the decoration of some of the inner rooms. Beauty everywhere!

There is a widespread notion that the American possesses only a business sense and not an æsthetic sense; that the cities with their “cloud-scratchers” and elevated roads and warehouses are ugly. What a mistake! The horn of plenty that has scattered its treasures over this land has not forgotten beauty any more than wealth. Not to speak of natural beauties—Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains, and the like—I mean the works of man. Whoever planted woodbine, ivy, and other vines, to clamber in rich luxuriance up the walls, even to the roofs of houses and churches, knew that he was creating beauty. Here again nature comes to man’s aid, for the autumn foliage glows and gleams in colors which are quite unknown in our landscapes. In contrast with the brilliant hues there are soft and tender tones,—such an azure green, such a rosy gray, such a bright golden violet as only the most audacious art secessionist would venture to mix on his palette.

After the close of the Boston Congress public meetings were arranged in many other cities,—New York, Philadelphia, Worcester, Springfield, Northampton, Toronto, Buffalo, Cincinnati, and elsewhere; and in these places the principal men and women who had been speaking at the Peace Congress gave lectures concerning the transactions there and the peace movement in general. Everywhere were the same enthusiastic interest on the part of the public, the same dignified treatment on the part of official circles, and the same detailed and approving reports from the press. Our lectures were desired and applauded in churches, universities, girls’ schools, workingmen’s homes, concert halls,—everywhere.

On my return to New York I got somewhat acquainted with the city. The word “acquainted,” though, seems presumptuous when I had only a few days, or rather a few hours—for the days were filled for the most part with the duties of my calling—to devote to this giant phenomenon, this city of three millions. Nevertheless, even what is seen as quickly as in a lightning flash can leave an abiding impression, especially when it is so surprising and overpowering. If I were to sum up the impression that America made on me, I might say that I was affected somewhat as Bellamy’s hero was, who, after sleeping for many years, wakes up in an absolutely changed and improved world. Not as if, as in the case described by Bellamy, several centuries had been passed in sleep, but rather as if two or three decades, filled with discoveries and other advances, had been anticipated; thus seemed everything around me. The woman movement, the anti-alcohol movement, the social movement, technical arts, popular education, democratic spirit, toleration, comfort of living, luxury, physical development,—everything speedily carried forward and upward to a climax. A still deeper impression than the one made by all that was so abundantly flowering there (I grant that there may be also many poisonous plants in the garden) was made upon me by what is planted there, by what is still hidden in the seeds but is full of promise for rich harvests in the future. Education is power, education is freedom, education is ennoblement; and from that treasure, which is indeed imported from the Old World, such mighty systems of culture multiplied and disseminated will be established in the New World that for the coming generations an inestimable raising of the general standard of life is to be expected. I have had the opportunity to see universities, colleges, and libraries, and to hear about the settlements of university extension. “Education,” said an American lady to me, “is something which we feel in duty bound to disseminate widely; the whole people must be able to share in it.”

All the development of magnificence, all the zeal in conferring donations, which in the Old World has been shown in princely palaces and cathedrals, in the New World—and from far richer sources—flows into places for education. That, indeed, up to the present time, more fundamental knowledge is to be obtained at European universities is indicated by the fact that Americans whose means permit it, and who are particularly ambitious, come to us to study, and that all the professors and scientists there regard it as a privilege to be able to spend a few years as students in our higher institutions; but I am speaking now of the dissemination, especially the coming dissemination, of public instruction, which is still so young in America. Its deepening will come of itself, together with the rejection of much useless educational truck inherited from the olden days and not likely to be any longer useful for the new times.

Unfortunately I did not make the acquaintance of the so-called “smart set,” the upper four hundred, whose palaces line Fifth Avenue and who are so constantly regarded as the type of the leading classes in America—though as mistakenly so regarded as a certain Boulevard society is taken for the prototype of French character. It would have been very interesting to study this “smart set.” All that I saw was the outside of their palaces, but they certainly presented to the eye no remarkable splendor. Their possessors—the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Morgans and Astors and others—at this season of the year were either still at their country estates or away traveling.

The huge opera house, in which German, French, and Italian operas, each in the original, are performed by the leading artists of the world, was not yet opened. The Italian opera will begin with Puccini’s Bohème, sung by Caruso and Marcella Sembrich. Madame Schumann-Heink, who is undertaking the rôle of Kundry, is just at present the object of many social attentions and incessant interviews. The performances of Parsifal, regarded by Frau Cosima Wagner as desecration, are said to have been of overwhelming beauty.

The Americans are importing all our treasures of refined art and old culture; for us there is only one revenge: we must absorb more and more of their acquisitions, give more attention to the life that is unfolding there, rise above envy and jealousy, above pride and prejudice,—those feelings which in an epoch of international intercourse are no longer suitable, and which in the past have stood in the way of the development of universal comity. For, after all, we are only one world; every treasure, every forward step in whatever corner of the earth, increases the wealth and the potentiality of happiness of the whole human family.

The words “human family” (a family as yet far from united, still living in bitter feud) bring me back to the theme that lay at the basis of my whole transatlantic journey,—the Peace Congress. In New York, among the festivities arranged in honor of the delegates, was a great meeting organized by the Germans living there. It was held in Terrace Garden under the honorary chairmanship of Oscar S. Straus, member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, former Ambassador Dr. Andrew D. White, and the universally respected Carl Schurz. “Why so respected?” This question was once put to Dr. White by Bismarck. “Tell me, on what grounds does the old forty-eighter enjoy such universal and high regard in your country?” “For this reason,” replied the American ambassador, “because he was the man who treated the slavery question, which at that time was the question, not, as was customary, from the philanthropical or the constitutional, but from the philosophical standpoint, with regard to its significance not for the negroes, but for the country.”

Perhaps, I might add, the Americans are so charmed by Carl Schurz because, when he was in a leading position in the public service, he called a halt in the increasing deforestation of the country. And, above all, because he is a personality! I made his acquaintance, and in his house spent one of the most exhilarating hours of my American visit.

I made a pilgrimage to Grant’s tomb, on the door of which his exclamation is carved, “Let us have peace!” And I saw the statue of General Sherman, who uttered the famous saying, “War is hell.” The hellish reports of the ten days’ battle raging in eastern Asia—where, at the very time when we in America were discussing the question of peace, the “field of honor” was covered with incredible numbers of the dead,—brought to us every day a confirmation of that utterance of General Sherman’s.

We inspected the famous hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria. It exceeds in size and splendor anything that has thus far been attained in the way of public houses. And yet a new hotel has just been opened in New York, called the St. Regis, which is said to be furnished even more luxuriously, with all sorts of art treasures, old Gobelins, masterpieces of painting, and the like; but it is small—intended only for the upper four hundred; I was told that the lowest price for a room was eight dollars a day.

The ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria is adorned with a painting proudly proclaimed by the guide as “the biggest canvas in the world.” Not the best-painted but the biggest canvas in the world! This naïve boastfulness is rather characteristic of the worship of the gigantic that prevails there. When our shops announce a sale they call it a “great sale”; the American advertisement invites you to a “mammoth sale.” The cicerone of the hotel called our attention to the fact that there are three thousand gilded chairs in the ballroom and the adjacent drawing-rooms, each with a different hand-painted scene on its cushion. One of our company immediately sat down on one of these artistically glorified chairs, apparently to test whether or not such delightful artistry aroused special sensations. I had a ride on the underground railway, which was to be opened to the public a few days later, but which had been “running” regularly for three months so that its use might be perfected before it was turned over to the public,—maneuver before the real attack!

I had the opportunity in New York of making the acquaintance of Mr. Pulitzer, the owner of the most widely circulated American newspaper, the World. His home (I was invited there to a luncheon) is of the most exquisite splendor, and two tall, wonderfully beautiful daughters are its life. But with all his wealth, all his power, the publisher of the World is a poor man. Two of the greatest blessings of life this otherwise vigorous, young-looking man, not yet sixty, has lost,—his eyesight and sleep. Nevertheless, he works incessantly, dictates his leading articles, watches and regulates the whole course of his great paper,—a paper which does not belong to yellow journalism, but, on the contrary, has long advocated the peace movement. A few years ago, when the relations between the United States and Great Britain were strained to the danger point, the World requested answers to a series of questions, and among the responses was one from the then Prince of Wales, which did much to allay the danger of war.

If I had lunched a day later at the Pulitzer house, I should have made the acquaintance of Roosevelt’s opponent, Mr. Alton B. Parker. The World favors the Democratic party without yielding to the illusion that at the present time the election can be won from the Republicans. Is not that a fortunate country that has only two political parties? Yet even there not everything is rosy in the political arena. They have their brazen-faced practice of corruption, economic battles,—trusts and strikes,—that is to say, capitalism and labor unions in hostile, threatening opposition (and various leaders of the latter bodies are said not to be superior to corruption). Alas! even there, too, there is need of what all politics, domestic and foreign, everywhere fails to possess,—the moral perception.

Philadelphia—after New York and Chicago the largest city of the Union—offered us peace people a very favorable territory. This city, founded by Puritans, to-day still largely inhabited by Friends,—as the war-detesting Quakers are called,—dominated by the statue of William Penn who signed the treaty of peace with the Indians (the statue crowns the tower of the city hall),—this city is, so to speak, permeated with the sap of the peace ideas. Correspondingly cordial, therefore, was the welcome that was accorded the delegates of the Boston Peace Congress. The speakers at the public reception were the governor of Pennsylvania, the mayor of the city, the provost of the university, and the president of the academy. The governor referred to the widespread diffusion of our idea, which was daily gaining ground. The time, he said, could not be far away when collective humanity—the nation, the state—would be subjected to the same laws which enjoin upon individuals an appeal to right instead of violently taking the remedy into their own hands.

One of the great attractions of Philadelphia is its park, through which we were taken on a drive. It really resembles a landscape rather than a park, so enormous, so extensive are all its dimensions. Where we have only a clump of trees, there they have a grove; where we have a grassplot, they have a prairie. At the same time it is carefully tended and richly adorned with flower beds, fountains, and statues, like a prince’s beautiful castle garden.

Washington was not included in the schedule of cities where lectures were to be given; but I ran over there for two days in order to get some idea of the capital city, and especially to meet the President.

Washington has a character very different from that of the other cities of the Union. It is not a city exuberant with trade and business; it has no skyscrapers, no elevated or subterranean railways, no bank or trade palaces,—only very quiet, very broad streets, planted with trees and bordered by villa-like houses. Even the embassies and legations are not housed in palaces but in similar elegant villas. On the other hand, that part of the city where the Capitol, the Congressional Library, and the obelisk rise from amidst wide-stretching grassplots, is of overpowering magnificence. You might think yourself transported to an antique world. But no—it is the new world, the world of the future.

The Public Library is unquestionably one of the most splendid edifices in the world. The private citizen who goes thither to read after his day’s work is accomplished can give himself up to the feelings that are quickened by an environment of harmonious splendor. You seem to be in fairyland, and the paintings and marble columns and stairways have an especially imposing effect when the lofty dome of the central hall is illuminated with electric lights.

On the seventeenth of September I had the honor of being received by the President of the United States, and of having a private talk with him about the cause which is so dear to my heart. Friendly, sincere, evidently thoroughly impressed with the seriousness and the importance of the matter discussed,—so seemed Theodore Roosevelt to me. Gallant Soldatentum—even more, adventure-loving Roughridertum—is in his blood, but he has a far-seeing social good will in his spirit; and this last makes him the pioneer of a new era. He was the first to put into action the tribunal of The Hague; he is now going to call a new Hague Conference.

“Universal peace is coming,” he said to me; “it is certainly coming—step by step.”

It would be unbecoming in me to repeat what was said in an unconstrained conversation; only the following I might be permitted to state here. I had mentioned the Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty that came so near being concluded in 1897, and suggested that the present would be an appropriate moment for taking it up again.

“I have the intention,” replied the President, “of inaugurating treaties, not with England alone, but with all nations,—with France, Germany—”

“Do not forget my Austria,” I interrupted.

He smiled. “And Austria and Italy, and England of course. But England should not be the sole and only one, else the treaty might be misunderstood as an alliance of the English-speaking races. It is America’s duty to make treaties simultaneously with all civilized nations. And I contemplate one other thing, namely, that these treaties shall be more far-reaching in their scope, and with fewer limitations, than those already concluded in Europe.”

The President said among other things that he especially admired Austria’s acquisition of power in Bosnia; he called this “a feat.”

I went from Washington directly to Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a manufacturing city, therefore somewhat gray and smoky, but nevertheless it is surrounded by a girdle of smiling villas and is provided with a public garden which, not without justification, is called Eden Park. The lectures of the peace delegates were delivered in a concert hall which holds four thousand people, and which on that evening was filled to overflowing. The heads of the official departments, among them a bishop, delivered the introductory addresses, and I was given the flattering surprise of seeing, over the platform, the title of my book gleaming in electric letters, “Lay Down Your Arms.”

On our way back we stopped at Buffalo, and from there made an excursion to Niagara Falls. One thing with which I might reproach this splendid spectacle of nature—and yet it is not its fault—is the circumstance that around the raging waters, on the steep, wooded banks, there stand, in place of Indian wigwams, modern villas and hotels, and—worse yet—on a plateau mirrored in the rolling flood a billboard, twenty meters long, calls the attention of pilgrims to Niagara to a certain species of biscuit! On the other hand, it is bewitching when from various positions brilliantly colored rainbows, accompanied by others of paler hues, appear and vanish and hover over the rising mists like veils.

I brought my visit to America to a close with a visit of several days in Ithaca at the house of the former ambassador, Dr. Andrew D. White. Ithaca and its famous university is a little world in itself.

Thus these three weeks in America have flown like a dream, and I am again on board, homeward bound—richer in magnificent impressions, with my mental horizon enlarged more than I had ever dreamed possible. I have looked through a new window—hastily, I must confess, and through only a narrow opening—into the universe.